Wake up: Britain is being demolished under our very noses

Simon Thurley says that, almost by stealth, the nation's built landscape is being transformed on a scale not seen since the postwar period. Our town and city centres are being rebuilt, 200,000 new houses must be constructed each year, and old buildings are being abandoned Something very important is going on out there, and I'm not sure that anyone has really noticed. Just look out of your window and you are likely to see fundamental changes happening to the place where you live. Cranes are out in force, a great metallic forest of them; our roads are populated by concrete mixers and lorries full of demolition waste; white vans full of electricians, plumbers and carpenters clog the streets, and their skips are two-deep on the roadsides. Everywhere you look there is scaffolding. This is not just the Olympics — although the size of the construction programme there is breathtaking — nor just the construction of more skyscraping offices in the City: it affects every town and city and a fair few villages too. Britain is, in fact, being rebuilt under our noses.

Of course Britain has always been rebuilt, whether by the Romans, by the Georgians or by the Victorian railway pioneers flinging tracks across the countryside and into the heart of mediaeval cities. Industries grow up and die, settlements flourish and wilt, fashionable areas become slums, and then the slums themselves become fashionable. But today there is no doubt that we are, again, in a radical and far-reaching state of physical change and, if the government can sustain the pace, it is going to get faster and more furious. The strange thing is that for anyone in their late seventies this will all sound and look disconcertingly familiar.

In February 1943, with the bombs still dropping, the National Gallery opened an exhibition called Rebuilding Britain. It had been inspired by the Royal Institute of British Architects, who realised that the effects of bombing alone would mean that there would have to be a major physical reconstruction of the country when the war ended. It was a brave and very modern event putting to the public the scale of the opportunity and the risks if it all went wrong. The show ended with the cry, 'The people of Britain will get the reconstruction they deserve.'

Now, with the distance of 60 years, we can judge whether the heroic optimism behind the dreams of postwar planners and architects did, in fact, give us the Britain we deserved. I believe that the returning war heroes did not, on the whole, get a Britain that was enhanced by outstanding new architecture and planning. In fact a very large part of the current massive building boom is replacing the failed concrete utopia described in Rebuilding Britain.

The seeds of British postwar reconstruction were in fact sown after the first world war, when people began to want to see a new type of city — indeed, a new way of living — that was distinct from the old world that had caused the war in the first place. The idea developed in the 1920s that we could create a new type of modern city for the future which, through the skills of planners and architects, could change the way people lived and thought.

Ultimately it took a second war to convince the politicians that the British city needed reinventing. Their vision was encapsulated in a new design for the bombed-out centre of Plymouth — a new city dedicated to the department store and the motor car. The principles behind Plymouth affected almost every historic city in Britain. Almost wherever you go today the effects of postwar reconstruction can be felt. The division of towns into functional zones, civic, retail, leisure and residential; the creation of fast through-routes for traffic; the separation of pedestrians from traffic; the construction of shopping centres overlying the street plan; the replacement of suburban terraced housing by tower blocks and the demolition of Victorian civic buildings for new ones.

These principles created the sort of problems that a beautiful historic town like Gloucester faces today. They are deep, intractable and scarring. But luckily they are often also self-destructing. The concrete shopping centres of Gloucester, Huntingdon and Bath are falling apart, civic buildings are often poorly located, road schemes intrusive. Even if they had not failed us, many would have to be replaced anyway.

The story of Birmingham encapsulates this perfectly. The city centre had been very badly damaged in the Blitz and Herbert Manzoni, the father of Birmingham's postwar redevelopment, had a clear vision of a great new modern city. The 23-acre Bullring shopping centre, begun in 1961 and costing the vast sum of £8 million, was based on the American mall and incorporated a bus station and a nine-storey office block. Soon the Victorian library was demolished and replaced with a new Brutalist one, an inverted pyramid with space for 1.5 million books. The new multilevel motorway network ringed the city including, on its outskirts, the remarkable and sculptural Spaghetti Junction, and in the centre the inaptly named Paradise Circus. New housing was created in mediumand high-rise to a high density, providing a new sort of home for Brummies By the 1970s Birmingham represented both the dream of the postwar planners and the Frankenstein they had created. But Birmingham's story is ending happily. Over a period of ten years Manzoni's vision has been carefully and comprehensively dismantled by a new generation of planners and, if the council's plan to demolish the library goes ahead, within a short while no trace will be left of Britain's first and most comprehensive Brutalist city. Birmingham, for anyone who has not been there recently, has been transformed; Brindley Place is one of the most successful and enjoyable new city centres in England, brilliantly harmonising old and new, small and large, modern and traditional materials. It spreads much further than that, scrubbing out the old Bullring and the arterial roads. All that is now needed is the demolition of Britain's most depressing railway station — New Street.

Not every city will be as lucky as Birmingham. In order to rebuild town centres in the postwar reconstruction programme, councils had to buy up most of the land. This resulted in shopping centres like the Bullring being held in single ownership, and means that today, as these monoliths come up for replacement, they will, once again, be comprehensively rebuilt. The centre of my own town, the beautiful and historic King's Lynn, has just lost its monolithic 1960s shopping centre only to have it replaced by another just as inappropriate. It had to be done, but not in breeze blocks and concrete briquettes. In far too many towns local authorities frightened of losing 'investment opportunities' and 'regeneration' are agreeing to poorly designed wholesale development cooked up by developers with short-term interests.

Today's building boom is not only a rerun of town centre development, it is a rerun of the housing crisis. We are seeing slum clearance (under another name) in the north, and new towns in the south. The Barker report on housing published two years ago predicted that, by 2026, 70 per cent of households will be single-person, and that this will require us to build 200,000 new homes a year. Gordon Brown has now upped the target by another 40,000 a year. This massive increase in building will leave virtually no town south-east of a line from the Wash to the Solent untouched. Just as the London overspill programme of the 1960s and 1970s doubled the population of Georgian market towns, so places like Lincoln will grow by more than 20 per cent.

Meanwhile the vast and ambitious Pathfinder programme in the north will have spent £1.2 billion by the end of next year dealing with the effects of housing market failure, that is to say house-price collapse and vacancy. It is planned to demolish 57,000 houses by 2018, although only 10,000 have been taken down so far. Forty thousand have been completely refurbished, and tens of thousands of pre-1914 houses await their fate. A plethora of new agencies have been set up to oversee the programme, some excellent and forward-looking, others struggling to come to terms with the enormity of the challenge.

Public buildings have not escaped these changes. Some of the first postwar town halls, libraries and sports centres were genuinely forward-looking buildings, innovative and adaptable; the National Sports Centre at Crystal Palace and Plymouth Civic Centre have both been listed, but these are the exception. Too often these structures were put in the wrong place, built with alienating materials and poorly conceived. They have blighted the towns that they were designed to enhance.

Meanwhile a swath of earlier Edwardian and Victorian buildings have finally ceased to meet modern requirements. Police stations, courthouses, jails, hospitals and public conveniences are all being closed down. In London alone 13 Victorian and Edwardian swimming baths have shut in the last 20 years and another nine are under threat. Schools are perhaps in for the greatest change. The government's Building Schools for the Future programme promises to rebuild or refurbish every school in the next ten to 15 years. There are 25,000 schools in England and many are in need of refurbishment. Of these 6,000 are listed and probably the same number again are protected by being in conservation areas. But these old schools, usually fine Victorian buildings, are the ones that are being targeted for rebuilding — as they are supposedly out of date. Hundreds of perfectly good, handsome and robust schools are being abandoned up and down England while new schools are being constructed nearby.

Today there are 60,000 pubs in Britain and 56 of them are closing each month. In the capital the problem is at its worst: pubs there are closing at a rate of five a week. This is a reflection of big changes in the way we live, of the dominance of television, of the desire to drink at home, the rise of restaurants and in some urban areas the rise of continental-type bars. The result is yet another rapidly vanishing bastion of our landscape.

I could go on. But I hope the picture has been painted. Our town and city centres are being rebuilt, the suburbs enlarged and remodelled, our public buildings reconstructed or replaced, the great Victorian and Edwardian civic structures abandoned, pubs are being turned into restaurants, banks into bars, warehouses into flats, town halls into offices, even churches into cafés. This is change to our way of life on a scale not seen since the war.

The question is: will we get anything better than we did in the 1960s and '70s? Will the vision of politicians and architects pay more attention to the way people like to live and work? Will old and new be successfully blended to make beautiful places? Will the clarity of thought in Whitehall (where there is a determination to go for quality) simply get diluted at a local level as councils fail to come to terms with terrifying centrally set targets? With a small number of exceptions, like Birmingham, there is cause for concern. The expertise and experience is simply not available in many local authorities to ensure a successful outcome. Commercial developers are playing them for quick profits, building cheaply and selling on, leaving badly built and designed schemes in the centre of historic towns. Some of these are as bad as what they replace and will be as little loved and as little mourned when they, in turn, are demolished.

In 1973 the postwar destruction of our towns juddered to a halt. Economic and political crisis was at the root of this, but that was not all. Popular protest and discontent led to people marching on the streets. Covent Garden was saved from destruction by emotional demonstrations. People rejected the vast architectural and social experiment of postwar reconstruction. Last week the National Trust flexed its muscles at the government's growth plans, threatening to buy up land in the green belt to stop its development. This, I predict, will not be the last we will see of people power.

Simon Thurley is the chief executive of English Heritage.